116 SCIENTIST IN RUSSIA

Russian people of their congenital inactivity. If a tenth
of the plans made by the Soviet people had been carried out,
Russia would be the Utopia the Dean of Canterbury thinks
it is* But the bridge between planning and accomplish-
ment cannot be crossed without a hard-headed insistence
on practical results, and this attitude is foreign to the
Russian character. Therefore the new Russia has needed
men who rate utility as the highest test of a theory.
Genetics is a notoriously useless subject; Lysenko was not
far wrong when he said it had contributed practically
nothing to agriculture. Soviet genetics should be utili-
tarian : Lysenko regards it as his business to make it so.
* There is no fortress *, said Stalin, * that bolsheviks cannot
take by storm.* This slogan is applied to the Arctic and to
the deserts; it must be applied also to the unexplored
regions of science and agriculture: that is Lysenko*s belief.
It is a belief which is very valuable for the rebuilding of
Russia. The fact that it is a point of view inapplicable to
genetics without distorting the truth is, from the political
angle, neither here, nor there. That, in my opinion, is
another reason why Lysenko and his school are quietly
tolerated.

And what of Lysenko the man? Can we, Russian
fashion, analyse his motives as he so often analyses those
of his opponents? He is not a charlatan. He is not a
showman. He is not personally ambitious, He is extremely
nervous and conveys the impression of being unhappy,
unsure of himself, shy, and forced into the r61e of leader
by a fire within him. He believes passionately in his own
theories, and he is not convinced by cold reasoning. He
describes his own writing as always impartial, although
passionate, and the writing of his opponents as * passion-
less, cold-blooded and measured, yet extremely partial'.
He identifies his work with the welfare of Soviet agriculture,
so that any attack on him he interprets as an attack on the
Soviet state. He is fired by his mission to scourge bourgeois
genetics out of Russia, because he really believes it is harnl